|
![Text block: A quote from S.L. Johnson, a Black Louisianan, in a letter to Kansas Governor John St. John, from the year 1879. "I am anxious to reach your state...because of the sacredness of her soil washed by the blood of humanitarians for the cause of freedom."](anxioustoreach.gif)
Remembering the terrible
price paid by Kansas to enter the Union as a free state, a Kansas Freedman's
Assciation welcomed thousands of black refugees during the "Black
Exodus" of 1879, saying the state had "shed too much
blood for this cause now to turn back from her soil these defenseless
people fleeing from the land of oppression."
|
![Drawing of a southern Black family, motehr, father and son, looking toward the relative freedom and self-determination offered by the western frontier. Although the look toward the West, they are depicted as still in bonds, the hands of the parents are bound.](family.gif)
|